Data Quality in Cooperative Information Systems

Abstract

A Cooperative Information System (CIS) is a large-scale information system that interconnects various systems of different and autonomous organizations, geographically distributed and sharing common objectives (De Michelis et al., 1997). Among the different resources that are shared by organizations, data are fundamental; in real world scenarios, organization A may not request data from organization B, if it does not trust B’s data (i.e., if A does not know that the quality of the data that B can provide is high). As an example, in an e-government scenario in which public administrations cooperate in order to fulfill service requests from citizens and enterprises (Batini & Mecella, 2001), administrations very often prefer asking citizens for data rather than from other administrations that have stored the same data, because the quality of such data is not known. Therefore, lack of cooperation may occur due to lack of quality certification.